A banned East German past, a desire to create that cannot fit into documents, and a ninety-five-year life spent between cinema and painting… Known as Jürgen Böttcher in his identity as a documentary filmmaker and using the pseudonym Strawalde in front of his canvases, the master artist born in 1931 brings his layered memory to the surface with the exhibition “Parade,” opening at Galerie Michael Haas as part of Berlin Art Week.
Strawalde’s brush is too overflowing to fit into the narrow molds of regimes and ideologies. Expelled from the Artists’ Association in the former East Germany (GDR) after his works were deemed “formalist,” and prevented from displaying his works in the public sphere for many years, the artist was only able to pursue his painting practice with complete freedom after the reunification of Germany. In his canvases, there is no grudge or haste from those years of restriction, but rather a pure assimilation of life. Dense layers of paint piled onto canvases, raw textures formed on the surface, and expressionistic lines shaped by an intuitive dance of the hand bring the physical power of painting to its peak.
Explaining that expressive power so deeply intertwined with himself, the artist notes: “If I have managed to make a successful painting, this painting is composed of the essence of thousands of things I have seen, smelled, tasted throughout my life, and even my dreams.” Figurative forms appearing and vanishing on the canvases are a direct reflection of this unmediated dialogue conducted by the artist’s hands, of a past accumulated layer by layer, and of sensory memory.
Set to be present in person at the age of 95 during the opening on the evening of Thursday, September 10, Strawalde lays before us with complete sincerity a unique accumulation of emotion extending from the 20th century to the present day as a living witness to German art history.
